Historic Heat Wave And Electricity Bills Drive Tendril's Residential Energy Management Deployments Across The Country

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Boulder, Colorado (PRWEB) August 08, 2012

With the sizzling summer of 2012 bringing record heat and with it, mounting residential electricity bills and the risk of more brownouts, Tendril, the leader in delivering consumer engagement applications and services, is helping to stabilize energy delivery services and save consumers energy and money. The company has worked with more than 40 energy provider and ecosystem customers and in the last five months alone has added more than 3.5 million households onto its software platform across multiple touch points including home energy reports, a web portal, as well as smart in-home devices and load control switches. These touch points are delivered as part of energy efficiency, demand response and load control programs designed to help reduce the threat of peak load outages and household budget-crippling utility bills.

The company’s growth has exponentially increased the amount of ‘big data’ handled by its Tendril Connect™ cloud platform. Tendril Connect is now processing nearly five terabytes of data each month including real-time meter, pricing, billing, demographic, building science, weather, and behavioral data. The Tendril Connect platform uses best-of-breed technologies including Hadoop, Cassandra and CloudFront for effectively processing, storing, and performing analytics on this high-volume, distributed data to allow unsurpassed performance and insight.

Some highlights of Tendril’s work with its utility customers and partners to help consumers save on energy and their electric bills, include:

• By Labor Day, Tendril will have shipped more than 1 million home energy reports during the 2012 summer months helping consumers become better informed about their energy usage and cut electricity-related costs. Tendril’s research as well as independent third party research has shown that just energy information alone combined with personalized energy-saving recommendations can help households save on average 3 percent of their electricity costs without replacing a single appliance or window.
• Tendril has shipped more than 60,000 demand management devices, including load control switches, smart thermostats, in-home displays and IP smart energy gateways, to help its customers access real-time data, enable reliable load control, better manage demand, improve customer service and prevent outages in some of the country’s hottest regions.
• Tendril Energize™ Online, which includes a web portal and mobile application, is engaging thousands of consumers on a continuous basis to deliver real energy savings. According to research from Accenture, consumers spend on average just six to nine minutes a year interacting with their utility. However, more than one-third of all consumers with Energize Online log-on every few days to manage their energy usage and achieve savings. At one project, consumers have achieved an average and sustained energy savings of 9 percent over the last two years. Energize Online uses behavioral science and analytics to create an active learning environment that presents real-time data as well as tips and recommendations to help people manage their energy usage.
• Tendril’s application developer program currently supports more than 400 developers with 20 open APIs. The program is driving innovation in energy management applications and has produced more than 20 applications, including Xenergy, which took the SDG&E Best Energy Management App award in the AT&T San Diego Apps Challenge. Essent, the largest energy provider in the Netherlands, is using the program and the Tendril Connect platform in the world’s first ever project to crowdsource an energy management app for its residential customers.
• In the last two years alone, Tendril’s 360 Consumer Marketing Group has worked with 11 energy providers on more than 20 branded marketing outreach campaigns to educate, acquire and retain consumers in energy programs. Together with these customers, Tendril has successfully marketed to millions of residential energy users around the world. The company has also delivered world-class response rates of 4-7 percent compared to the industry averages of less than 1.5 percent.

“Massive heat waves and near-constant peak demand are not good for utilities, their customers or the grid, and can result in brownouts, interruptions in service and high electricity costs for consumers,” said Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril. “Preventing service interruptions in the future requires a mix of smart hardware, software, marketing and education, all of which we provide to consumers through our utility customers. Thankfully, we’re having a tangible impact on households around the world as consumers look for ways to become more efficient and save on their utility bills.”

Top Five Recommendations for Saving Energy Today Without Spending a Dime

One of the unique capabilities that Tendril provides its utility customers is an “Ask the Expert” service and feature within Energize that allows consumers to interact with a live expert and ask about energy-saving measures and tips. Some of the top recommendations Tendril’s experts offer are the subject of a blog post titled, “Take it from an Expert: 5 Easy, No-Cost Steps to Save Energy Now."

The combination of an integrated approach to consumer engagement and the customer journey, and delivering software applications, smart hardware, marketing services and consumer education has led to proven energy savings and improved consumer engagement and satisfaction. For example:

• Tendril Energize Reports yield energy savings of 1-3 percent per household
• Tendril Energize Online yields energy savings of 4-7 percent per household
• Tendril Energize Home Control enabling automated energy efficiency yields energy savings of 8-10 percent per household
• Tendril Energize Demand Response and Load Control yields peak load control of greater than 1.2 kilowatt demand reduction per household and energy savings over time of 15-25 percent.

About Tendril
Tendril is changing the way the world uses energy with its groundbreaking consumer engagement applications and services. Energy providers, product manufacturers, and consumer channel partners use Tendril’s solutions to foster deeper consumer relationships, differentiate their products, achieve business objectives and drive increased value over the lifetime of the consumer. The company’s flagship application suite, Tendril Energize™ delivers the insight, choice and control utilities and consumers need to meet their energy management goals. All of its solutions are built on Tendril Connect™, an open software platform that integrates an ecosystem of product and service providers, enabling them to engage consumers and seamlessly engage, extend and evolve their offerings. Tendril has worked with more than 40 energy providers as well as product and service providers and has implemented more than 50 smart energy projects around the world. In 2012, the company opened its platform to developers to support the creation of an open application marketplace. It now has more than 400 developers registered in the program and more than 20 applications have been built using Tendril Connect.

Tendril is headquartered in Boulder, Colo. with regional offices in Boston, San Francisco, and Melbourne, Australia. It is venture backed by VantagePoint Capital Partners, Siemens Venture Capital (SVC), Good Energies, RRE Ventures and GE. For more information, visit http://www.tendrilinc.com.

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